Via The Guardian, a report on how rising damage to our world’s land, caused mostly by food production, puts ability to feed planet’s growing population at risk: Human damage to the planet’s land is accelerating, with up to 40% now classed as degraded, while half of the world’s people are suffering the impacts, UN data […]
Read more »Via InvestigateMidwest, an article on the US Government’s impaired ability to track agricultural land ownership: American soil is becoming less and less American when it comes to ownership. Foreign companies are snapping up land across the country, including millions of acres of farmland. But the conversation about foreign agricultural policy is difficult to have, according […]
Read more »Via Investigate Midwest, a report on the rapid growth of foreign investment in U.S. cropland in the past decade: Foreign investment in U.S. cropland has nearly tripled in the past decade, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. The total cropland controlled by foreign interests in 2020 was 10.9 million acres, up from 4.1 million […]
Read more »Via Salaam Gateway, a look at whether large-scale land acquisitions in Africa really lead to more productivity: The 2007-2008 global food crises, caused by escalating oil prices; a greater request for biofuels and trade decisions, triggered an increased demand for fertile land and has resulted in internationally listed companies, investment funds and private investors entering […]
Read more »Via AgWeb, an article on how farmland currently appears to be something akin to a modern-day gold rush: it can’t be bought up fast enough, while per-acre prices fetched for recent sales set record high after record high: It’s a conversation occurring more regularly in rural coffee shops across the United States: “Who bought the […]
Read more »Via Mother Jones, commentary on “Ukraine has what may be the richest soil in the world,” writes University of Georgia historian Scott Reynolds Nelson in his astonishing new book Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World. “In 1768, Tzarina Catherine II sent a hundred thousand Russian troops through this region and across the Black Sea […]
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